Wednesday, 31 July 2013

While clicking back and forth, I stumbled across a cretinous - not to mention rude - Home-Owner-Ist responding to a comment of mine on the ASI blog:

Mark Wadsworth: If you are going to count "below market" rents in social housing as a subsidy, then you also have to account for about twenty times as much in subsidies to owner-occupation.

literate3: There is no polite form of reply to a remark as stupid as that. I paid for my house out of my savings from my after-tax income.

The first sentence is just an insult, ignore that.

It is irrelevant how you raised the money to buy your house*, what you paid the previous owner was the value of the subsidy you expected to receive and when you sell it, you will be selling it for the value of the subsidy the net owner expects to receive/which you will have to forego. It's a Ponzi scheme.

The land value = the value of the future subsidy.

And I did not say that most people didn't pay for their houses in cash, I was pointing out what they were paying for, so he is throwing in a completely irrelevant factoid. It might more be pertinent to note that actually people pay off their mortgages out of the money they save on rent.

This bleating about "I bought my house out of taxed income" is a classic KLN and completely irrelevant, it's about as dumb as saying "I paid for my car out of taxed income, so the government should get everybody else to pay for the repairs."

So the second sentence is crap as well, which leaves us with precisely nothing.

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comments:

This highlights the fact people don't understand the difference between buying something and paying just compensation.

A land title is nothing more than privately exchangeable licence that allows the holder to consume commonly created wealth for a small fraction of its value. Land prices represent the capitalised value of this saving.

This theft is normalised, so it's only natural that people bleat that taxation of "their" property is immoral.

I believe slave owners made exactly the same complaint.

Of course, the fact landowners thieve what doesn't belong to them, means the Government has to thieve everyone's real personal property. By coercion.

So we end up living in a society based on double theft, backed by Government writ.

The Faux Lib's are the biggest hypocrites in all this. They espouse freedom, small government and low taxes. What their philosophy on property rights actually leads to is a fag papers difference with hard line socialists.

There's should be a special place in Hell for them. And a very special place for Matthew Sinclair.

Reading back and forth, 'they' didn't really like your intervention, did they?

In re libertarians there are those (Rothbard?) who are anarcho-libertarians who building from the 'first homesteader' principle then ignore the development of society that occurs to secure their property rights and then go on to ignore or block the discussion on the best way to actually pay for that.

The trouble is that the narrow view of property rights - that it applies only to land, and ingores your iPhone say - distorts all discussion. Also all anti-lvt-ers seem to not realise that taxes are rent anyway. So wouldn't it be better simply to charge 'rent' aka LVT?